A long-time carriage driver – he is the son of Irish immigrants who came to America and chose a life with the horses in Central Park – e-mailed me last night and asked me this: “what do you think a victory for the carriage trade would be in this city right now? What would it look like? What would it mean?”
A good question perhaps the very best one to ask at this point in the life of the horses and the people who live and work with them. Right now, two elements are defining victory, controlling the dynamic and future over this struggle: the mayor and the Teamsters Union.
The mayor has been honest, if nothing else, about his idea of victory. He wants to ban the carriage trade from the city and remove every one of the horses from New York. Whatever his true motives – I do not live inside of his head – the mayor says he believes horses do not belong in New York at all in 2016. Since taking a boatload of money from animal rights political workers, he has never wavered.
He says this idea does not apply to the mounted police horses who, he says, do belong in the city. Just because.
The Teamsters have come to define victory differently. For them, victory is a stables in Central Park, some jobs saved, providing they can get the city to agree to more horses and longer hours and fewer restrictions.
The carriage trade, battered, exhausted, nearly broke and confused does not have single clear or cohesive goal. They are somewhat dependent on the Teamsters for that right now. They just want to survive and be left alone. They are fighting to exist, not to win. Easy for me to say, fighting is stressful, expensive and uncertain.
But victory is not the same as surviving. It depends.
I believe they could win. I believe there is a new social awakening and there are many more people out there eager to help and support them if they would choose to define victory in a broader and more dramatic way. The mayor is intensely unpopular with many New Yorkers, the carriage drivers are an appealing rallying point to challenge a mayor who claims to be progressive but is not.
The carriage driver is the only person in the city who has asked me to define my idea of victory, so I am on my own and willing to oblige. Moving to Central Park is not, to me, a victory. It is a marginalized and trivialized existence of dependence, it puts the proud trade at the utter mercy of the man who is most determined to destroy them. It makes them a ward of the city, and no one in New York seems to like being a ward of the city.
That does not sound like victory to me.
For me, victory would be totally rejecting the “agreement in principle” with the mayor to move the carriage trade into Central Park, and demanding that the City Council reject it. The Teamsters claim it isn’t really a deal anyway, so why not call it off and start again? The council members were appalled at the poor presentation the mayor’s staff made on Friday. A good time to strike back. A few more disastrous hearings with the mayor’s staff and they could very well win this round before it even starts. The public is stirred up again and paying attention, another golden moment of opportunity for the carriage trade.
The mayor is strong, but he has shown his Achilles heel. The horses seem to have his number, his own blind fanaticism is pulling him down. He has no cause here, his crusade is not just or rational. It has never made any sense, and makes no sense now. In an interview with Dana Rubinstein of Politico, Peter Singer, whose book “Animal Liberation” helped launch the animal rights movement, said the mayor’s focus on the carriage trade was misplaced, the urgent problem facing animals is their horrific lives on industrial factory farms.
The carriage horses, he said, are “no big deal.” It seems every time the mayor seeks to drive the horses away, people’s love for them grows. A rational politician would stay away from that.
The city’s three papers are also aroused right now, pummeling the mayor almost daily over his arrogance and dishonesty the gross violation of his sworn oath to represent all of his citizens, not just those who write big checks to his campaign. The people in the carriage trade are getting savvier by the day on social media, they are everywhere now online,making their case, showing happy horses rather than the tortured and abused images the animal rights people have been putting up for years.
Victory would be for the trade to maintain its independence and to refuse to be a ward of the state, living in stables taxpayers had to pay for when they have their own.
Victory would mean refusing to surrender one single driver, one single stableman, one single horse to what was essentially a bribe, not a public interest.
Victory would mean asking the public for support, not for government money, The carriage trade is making money, they are a viable business, they own valuable property, they have supporters all over the country. They ought to reject living off the public trough – that will just cause the public to resent them – and demand that they be given the right as free men and women to be free to take care of themselves.
Which they have been doing for 150 years, and are doing still. This is not an industry in distress, it is only an industry that has been unfairly targeted by people who seem to have no idea what they are talking about.
Victory would mean a court decision protecting the right of good and hard-working people to live the lives they choose and keep their traditions and way of life. Victory would be a decision protecting all of us from the notion that a single millionaire and a mayor with his hand out can harass us, disrupt our lives and frighten our families, take our work and freedom and property away, and send the animals we love into peril for no discernible reason or public interest. In fact, in arrogant defiance of the public will.
Victory would be getting a judge to say they can use as many horses as they want, ride them wherever there is a need, work day or night, so long as the horses are rested, safe and healthy. The carriage trade has figured out how to do this. They are not in need of saving by the city government, the same city government that has vowed to destroy them.
Victory would be for the very skilled lawyers the trade has retained – Ron Kuby and Norman Siegel- to go to court to protest the almost certainly unconstitutional assault against a profitable and law-abiding and popular industry. And in seeking an injunction stopping an overreaching mayor from enacting new and crippling rules before they can take effect, or before there is any new home for the horses chosen or built.
Victory would be keeping all of the horses in New York City and adding more, and bringing them to the poor as well as the rich. This means finding new and even safer ways for them to live. Car free horse lanes, for one thing, stables in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, access to certain parks, and development deals for new stables in Manhattan. The NYPD has a spanking new stables underneath a new car dealership just blocks from the carriage horse stables, the owners of the building and the horses and police officers are all happy and healthy. Perhaps the owners of the carriage horse stables could also sell air rights, as so many other businesses and institutions have in the city.
Perhaps an honest city government or private real estate consultants would work out a deal similar to the one the NYPD negotiated – the new stables in exchange for the land rights.
West Side real estate values are soaring, similar deals have been negotiated all over New York. A small library in Brooklyn sold it’s air rights in exchange for a modern new building, it will rebuild, survive and thrive there smack in the middle of a booming real estate market. I can be done, it is done all the time in the city.
Victory would mean demanding that the city recognize the importance of keeping domesticated animals in the city and guaranteeing their safety. It is the responsibility of the city government to make the horses safe, not drive them away. They are working to make bicyclists safe in New York, and joggers and pedestrians. Since the horses are already the safest form of public transportation in the city by a shockingly wide margin, it should be a relatively simple task.
Victory would mean rejecting the idea – already accepted by the Teamsters and the carriage trade as inevitable – that the horses do not belong anywhere but in the park. I do not believe that is inevitable. If there were a different mayor, no one would even be discussing it.
This idea of retreating to the park is false and elitist. It is a form of defeat all its own.
Every borough and neighborhood in the city could benefit from having carriage horses and stables, not just tourists flying in from London. Ordinary people love to see horses, they have been with people in cities for thousands of years. Children love to touch them and learn about animal life from them. They have helped to build our cities, they lift up the spirits of people, they can do valuable therapy work, they can move people, help the lives of the handicapped, haul goods and produce without adding carbon to the atmosphere or making loud noise.
Victory means recognizing that the horses connect us to nature, they are one of the few and most powerful remaining symbols of the natural world and of the great work people and animals have done together building our life on the earth. We are all part of nature, the horses have been our partners and seek to remain with us.
It is a travesty to break this tradition for no other reason than the celebration of greed and money and the surrender of our lives to cars and trucks and real estate developers, which kill more people and ruin more lives every day than horses have ever done or could ever do.
We are a reflection of the horses, they are a reflection of us. What happens to them, happens to us. They should not be further ghettoized, as the animal rights movement suggests, and confined to one building in the great park. They should live everywhere people live, safely and in partnership and service and love.
If the horses move to the park (and most are sent away) most of the children in New York City will never see them, know them, touch them. That is an incalculable loss.
Perhaps the mayor could propose housing himself and all of the real estate developers and animal rights activists in the park and promise them new and renovated places in which to live at taxpayer expense. I see it as a kind of Hunger Games, they could fill the park with people watching; Greed versus Hate. They could all eat one another and radically improve the cultural and environmental life of the city, as well as its noise and pollution levels, and actually save countless jobs and horses and other animals.
That would be victory for me.